Surrogates of plutonium for detection equipment testing

Fight against illicit trafficking of nuclear material relies on the possibility to detect nuclear material concealed in vehicles, people or cargo containers. This is done by equipping and training law enforcement and security staff in border stations or other points of access to strategic places and critical infrastructures with radiation detection equipment.The design, development, testing and evaluation of these instruments ideally require the use of real nuclear material to assess, verify and certify their detection performance. Availability of special nuclear material may be an issue, especially for industry, since only few specialized laboratories are licensed for such material.This paper tries to analyse and describe the possibility to use suitable surrogates that may replace the use of real nuclear material in testing the detection capabilities of instruments used in nuclear security.

► Testing and evaluation of detection instruments require special nuclear materials.
► Aim of the paper is to identify suitable surrogates that can replace plutonium.
► Radioactive neutron sources can reproduce intensity and spectrum of Pu emission.
► Mixtures of radioactive sources can qualitatively simulate the photon emission.
► For spectrometers, it is not possible to eliminate totally the use of plutonium.